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Oh sweet mother of dog, can anyone help me work out how to download and open a goddamn PDF book on my iPad Mini? I bought the book. The default reader is Overdrive, but Overdrive doesn’t support PDFs and won’t download the file. I cannae work out how to download and open the book via another reader. (Adobe PDF Reader for iPad, Kindle, iBooks, etc.) Gah, ebook format wars and incompatibility make Fi very angry.

If the above Facebook post slash cry for help hasn’t already alerted you to this fact, I should probably spell it out for you: This blog post has been typed in anger.

I held off buying an ereader for this precise reason until just a few weeks ago. I wanted the format wars to be over and for the dust from them to be settled. I wanted to be able to purchase and read a book with just a couple of clicks and plenty of ease, with the biggest decision I had to make being which book to purchase. I didn’t want to spend hours researching and troubleshooting downloads and formats and getting increasingly exasperated and incensed.

This is not how I should be spending my Sunday afternoon.

The ultimate irony is that the book I’m trying to download—Beth Kanter and Allison H Fine‘s The Networked Nonprofit—isn’t even a book I want to read for fun. I mean no offence by that—I’m sure it’s a rollicking read. More importantly it’s a book I absolutely must, must, must read and reference for my university study (and it does contain, I’m sure, and by pure virtue of currently being inaccessible to me, the key to my entire thesis).

I should preface the rest of this rant with a note that this is not the fault of Booku, the ebook retail site that complements Boomerang Books. In fact, although Booku doesn’t support PDF files on iPad Minis, it had the clearest, most concise, most communicationally designed (that’s a technical term) help information I was able to find. If it weren’t for Booku, I’d still be googling and randomly attempting to download apps and readers and who knows what else (and no, I’m not just saying that because I technically work for them). I also feel the need to specify that it’s not an Apple product thing. It’s an ebook format war thing. Every ereading device currently available comes with quirks and cons.

The issue is that downloading a book to any device shouldn’t have to be this hard. This format war stuff needs to be sorted the f$%k out.

I can’t recount the steps I took to get my PDF onto my iPad, partly because I don’t want to bore you and mostly because I can’t remember the myriad, seemingly unending, largely fruitless steps I took. I should also admit that although I’ve now got the book open and readable on my Macbook Pro, I still haven’t managed to do it on my iPad Mini (it appears that I can only download the Adobe Digital Editions to the former, because it’s not an app, which kind of defeats the purpose of me specifically purchasing an iPad Mini to be an ereader). If you’ve got any advice on how to do this, I’m all eyes and ears.

Sigh.

Who knows, maybe half of what I’ve typed here today is incorrect. But I don’t apologise for that—this ebook stuff is unnecessarily confusing. Because here’s the rub: I don’t care what format my ebook is in. Nor should I even have to know. As the producers and distributors of this product, the publishers and retailers should be across that. And they should be making it as easy as possibly for me, the enduser, to simply decided on my purchase and download it with ease. That’s how the interwebs work these days.

There’s a reason why iTunes and Amazon’s (particularly with the latter’s oh-so-dangerous, impulse buy-encouraging one-click functionality) are dominating the sales spaces, and it’s not because they’re behemoths. It’s because they’ve made it easy for people to get the things they’re after. I’m actually reasonably tech savvy and interested in ebooks (it is, after all, central to my work and industry). If I can’t work it out, what hope is there for the lay reader who just wants to enjoy some Sunday afternoon Vampire Academy (I’m eagerly awaiting the arriving of my just-released The Indigo Spell)?

To be blunt (not that I haven’t already been), I resent having to have about 17 different ereading apps downloaded to my ereading device and playing which-one-will-work roulette every time I want to read a book. I resent not being able to use the ereader of my choice, instead being dictated to by the format that it may or may not support. I also resent having my ebooks spread across various apps—I imagine there’ll be a time when I lose my s$%t trying to find a book I know I own but can’t remember its format and, subsequently, in which app’s library it will happen to be stored.

I’m sure downloading Kanter’s book didn’t and doesn’t need to be this hard. But I didn’t know the steps and I shouldn’t have had to. They should be intuitive and the process should be seamless. It shouldn’t have involved me having to first find and then type in my stupid Adobe ID multiple times. (As a side note, Adobe also forced me to give the company my birthday, which enraged me no end. The only reason they need such information is to gather marketing data on me is that they will use against me or sell on to a third party. It’s not ok, Adobe. You knowing my age doesn’t affect whether I can get a goddamn PDF downloaded and opened on my device.)

Nor should the process have had to involve me becoming an expert of what kinds of ereading apps are available and which formats they support. For the record none of the ones I looked at—Goodreader, Stanza, Kindle, iBooks, Overdrive, and Bluefire—and especially not the last two, are intuitive titles that people would think to use as search terms. Where is the generically named ‘ebook reader’ app? Where is the ereader that’s easy to find, intuitive to use, and that reads all formats?

There are some weeks so bad that only comfort food and obscenely expensive aspirational purchases can save you. I’d argue I’ve just had one of those, having found out I have two tears in my knee and require an arthroscopy, getting flooded twice as badly as I did in 2011, and discovering that my stove has sprung a mammoth gas leak that will need wall-punchingly expensive plumbing repairs.

So, although I’d like to say that I bought my long-awaited, much-adored iPad Mini under happy circumstances (perhaps even—as I inadvertently worded it the other day—getting the clap on the way out of the Apple store), it’s come more as a consolation prize.

As consolation prizes go, though, I’m not complaining. The iPad Mini’s pretty incredible, and in just a few short days and limited plays, I’ve fallen in love with the following …

Its ereader capabilities

I’ve held out buying an ereader until now because I’m a dedicated worshipper of the cult of Apple, because I wanted to wait until the format wars died down, and because no ereader on the market did quite what I’d hoped (read: none were ‘Apple pretty’).

The crisp, white, Garamond font-inked pages unfurling on the iPad Mini actually made my heart soar. The handy functionality that enables me to highlight paragraphs, add notes, and more kind of make me wonder if I’ll ever return to physical copies, where I’m forced to dog-ear pages, add post-it notes that easily become unstuck, and rustle through pages down the track when I’m looking for a quote about something interesting that I vaguely remember marking somewhere along the way. In short, I’m obsessed with it and am currently plotting which ebooks I should buy.

Its accompanying magnetic cover

I had to buy it separately, but the iPad Mini’s light grey, magnetised cover that snaps on and snaps to without affecting usability or streamlined pretty is fantastic. Sometimes it’s the little things that really please.

The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) app

There are, rather confusingly, two SMH apps, and I downloaded both before discovering that the one I want appears in the iPad Mini’s newsstand. And, despite the initial confusion, the correct app’s proving brilliant. Indeed, traditional newspapers may be struggling to make the digital shift, but you wouldn’t know if from Fairfax’s SMH app. It’s crisp, clear, image-driven, and extremely aesthetically appealing. It’s also packed with handy functions to save stories for later, share with others, and jump to favourite sections.

I’m pretty sure this newspaper app will be my gateway app to the likes of apps for the New Yorker, Longform, and the New York Times.

The Foxtel Go app

Released just a few weeks ago and sounding far too good to be true, this app enables you to connect two iPads/iPad Minis to one Foxtel subscription. My parents have two Foxtel connections these days purely because they were sick of me poaching the TV to watch football at precisely the same time they wanted to watch some form of British TV.

I’ve long since moved out and drive back over to take advantage of said second Foxtel connection (I mean, it’s not as if I can afford to install Foxtel at my own place) and, though I’d heard I could effectively siphon off their connection to my iPad Mini, I was convinced it wouldn’t work. Surely Foxtel would detect I wasn’t on the same network, that I in fact wasn’t even in the same house?

It turns out not (although I’m still unsure whether this is deliberate or an as-yet-undiagnosed quirk), and I can now successfully pilfer Foxtel’s football from my parents’ connection. Provided it doesn’t change the ‘loophole’, Foxtel Go is officially the best. app. ever.

Finding out what’s next

I’m just days into my iPad Mini discovery tour, so I’m sure there are more than a billion features and apps I’ve not yet discovered. Are there any you’d recommend I download immediately and roadtest?

*Please excuse my rather dodgy phone photos—I’m a little incapacitated and a lot a fan of take-it-from-your-phone efficiency and ease. You get the right idea from them, yeah?